"Monomania" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... limits to the possibilities of monomania," I answered. "There is the condition which the modern French psychologists have called the 'idee fixe,' which may be trifling in character, and accompanied by complete sanity in every other way. A man who had read deeply ...
— The Return of Sherlock Holmes - Magazine Edition • Arthur Conan Doyle
... set fire to, and in one case there were as many as twelve or fifteen persons. This, however, is seldom stated in the indictment, as, if it is, the punishment is still death by the law, and it is supposed that a conviction is more easily obtained, by the capital charge being waived. Monomania is a rare cause of incendiarism, but still several well-certified cases have occurred in which no possible motive could be given. In one instance a youth of fifteen set fire to his father's premises seven times within a few hours. In another, a young female on ...
— Fire Prevention and Fire Extinction • James Braidwood
... child from some danger that threatened them. This work of rescue was the fulfilment of an ideal. Nothing should be allowed to stand in the way of it! The senior partner of Hatch & Buckley had been quick to note this condition of mind and to reap the profits that came therefrom. Monomania means money, was a business axiom in that gentleman's office, but he had pumped the stream dry and Von Barwig was now at the end of his resources. By some strange process of thought, Von Barwig recognised this fact, but it ...
— The Music Master - Novelized from the Play • Charles Klein
... to be undoubtedly another hoax. But Mr. Adams, loath to lose a good opportunity, still claimed to be heard on the charges made against him by the "infamous slave-holders." Mr. Smith, of Virginia, said that the House had lately given Mr. Adams leave to defend himself against the charge of monomania, and asked whether he was doing so. Some members cried "Yes! Yes!"; others shouted "No! he is establishing the fact." The wrangling was at last brought to an end by the Speaker's declaration, that the petition must lie over for the present. But the scene had been only the ...
— John Quincy Adams - American Statesmen Series • John. T. Morse
... real, and how far they sprang from monomania it is impossible to say. Cardan's relations with his brother physicians had never been of the happiest, and it is quite possible that a set may have been made in the Pavian Academy to get rid of a colleague, difficult to live with at ...
— Jerome Cardan - A Biographical Study • William George Waters
... enmity was so ungovernable that he grudged Caesar the honor of forgiving him. His animosity had been originally the natural antipathy which a man of narrow understanding instinctively feels for a man of genius. It had been converted by perpetual disappointment into a monomania, and Caesar had become to him the incarnation of every quality and every principle which he most abhorred. Cato was upright, unselfish, incorruptibly pure in deed and word; but he was a fanatic whom no experience ...
— Caesar: A Sketch • James Anthony Froude
... is not my wife. The only woman who has the right to bear my name is one whom I married when I was a young colonial official. She was a rather eccentric woman, of feeble mentality and incredibly subject to impulses that amounted to monomania. We had two children, twins, whom she worshipped and in whose company she would no doubt have recovered her mental balance and moral health, when, by a stupid accident—a passing carriage—they were killed ...
— The Eight Strokes of the Clock • Maurice Leblanc
... after the christening of Atherly town that an incident occurred which at first shook, and then the more firmly established, his mild monomania. His widowed mother had been for the last two years an inmate of a private asylum for inebriates, through certain habits contracted while washing for the camp in the first year of her widowhood. This had always been a matter of open sympathy ...
— Tales of Trail and Town • Bret Harte
... Moi—boulanger—me tirez pas, Monsieur Frenche!' It is like living in a state of siege, and the wonderful manner in which the cat preserves the character of being the only person not much put out by the intensity of this monomania is most ridiculous. The finest thing is that immediately after I have heard the noble sportsman blazing away at her in the garden in front I look out of my room door into the drawing-room and am pretty sure ...
— My Father as I Recall Him • Mamie Dickens
... into operation the incipient symptoms of monomania were rarely noticed, and many were driven into confirmed madness and crime by neglect or improper treatment, whilst some of the supposed lunatics were really wiser than their keepers or the doctors who attended ...
— Another World - Fragments from the Star City of Montalluyah • Benjamin Lumley (AKA Hermes)
... recognized you. That flush that came into her face was there when she saw her son this afternoon, so far as I can gather from Carvel's description. I wish they had waited for me. This remark about her son is very curious, too. It is more like a monomania than anything we have had yet. It is like a fixed idea in character; she certainly is not sane enough to have meant it ironically,—to have meant that Paul Patoff is not a son to her while thinking only of the other one who is dead. Did she speak Russian fluently? She has ...
— Paul Patoff • F. Marion Crawford
... dreaming in its bed; Calais with something of 'an ancient and fish- like smell' about it, and Calais blown and sea-washed pure; Calais represented at the Buffet by savoury roast fowls, hot coffee, cognac, and Bordeaux; and Calais represented everywhere by flitting persons with a monomania for changing money—though I never shall be able to understand in my present state of existence how they live by it, but I suppose I should, if I understood the currency question—Calais en gros, and Calais en detail, ...
— The Uncommercial Traveller • Charles Dickens
... priestesses got themselves into that place, or that they ever leave it. They are always there; they are always the same. You may go into a theatre when it is empty and dark; but did you ever go into a private bar that was empty and dark? A private bar is as eternal as the hills, as changeless as the monomania of a madman, as mysterious as sorcery. Always the same order of bottles, the same tinkling, the same popping, the same time-tables, and the same realistic pictures of frothing champagne on the walls, the same advertisements on the same ash-trays on the counter, the same odour ...
— The Grim Smile of the Five Towns • Arnold Bennett
... strong sense of shame was developed among them. It is plainly unfair to take an abnormal case to cast blame upon the Precepts, any more than to judge of the true teaching of Christ from the fruits of religious fanaticism and extravagance—inquisitions and hypocrisy. But, as in religious monomania there is something touchingly noble, as compared with the delirium tremens of a drunkard, so in that extreme sensitiveness of the samurai about their honor do we not recognize the substratum ...
— Bushido, the Soul of Japan • Inazo Nitobe
... declared, from fear lest there might attach to the birth of any possible heir of his those doubts of legitimacy which are almost invariably the lot of a pretender; but there can be no doubt that jealousy was an essential feature of his character, in which it amounted almost to monomania. He had caged his mistress long after he had ceased, by his own avowal, to care for her; he now caged his wife, and with probably about as much or as little affection. He had fenced up Miss Walkenshaw's bed with tables and chairs fitted with bells which the ...
— The Countess of Albany • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... character Lady Eleanore was remarkable for a harsh, unyielding pride, a haughty consciousness of her hereditary and personal advantages, which made her almost incapable of control. Judging from many traditionary anecdotes, this peculiar temper was hardly less than a monomania; or if the acts which it inspired were those of a sane person, it seemed due from Providence that pride so sinful should be followed by as severe a retribution. That tinge of the marvellous which is thrown over so many of these half-forgotten legends has probably ...
— Twice Told Tales • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... from Hellbeam's eyes. They were fiercely burning. They were the hot, passionate eyes of a man obsessed, of a man possessed of a monomania. Peterman, watching, beheld the sudden change in him. He shrank before the insanity ...
— The Man in the Twilight • Ridgwell Cullum
... Frank, all heaven and earth were "spaniolated," to him. He seemed to recollect nothing but that Heaven had "made Spaniards to be killed, and him to kill them." If he had not been the most sensible of John Bulls, he would certainly have forestalled the monomania of that young Frenchman of rank, who, some eighty years after him, so maddened his brain by reading of the Spanish cruelties, that he threw up all his prospects and turned captain of filibusters in the West Indies, for ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... the reader already knows, was a somewhat unobservant man of what was passing around him in the world. He had his own deep, stern trains of thought, which he pursued with a passionate earnestness almost amounting to monomania. The actions, words, and even looks of those few in whom he took an interest, he could sometimes watch and comment on in his own mind with intense study. True, he watched without understanding, and commented wrongly; for he had too little experience ...
— The International Magazine, Volume 2, No. 2, January, 1851 • Various
... entered my mind. My desire was to place Mary where she need suffer no more, where she would be free from hardships and labors, from lingering disease and slow death, and from my ungoverned brutalities. Above all, however, I wanted to accomplish the second murder—made possible to me by the first. A monomania possessed me. I wanted to put an end forever to my strain of blood before it was too late—before it had escaped me through the body ...
— The Blue Wall - A Story of Strangeness and Struggle • Richard Washburn Child
... proportions and of what Allah (to whom be praise!) had granted her of magnificence. He forgot all that happened to him in other days and also his affair with the Caliph and his people and his friends and his society. Such was the burden of his thoughts until he was taken with monomania and his body wasted. Hereupon Attaf sent for doctors, they surrounded him constantly, they employed all their talents for him, but they could find no remedy. So he remained during a certain time without anyone being able to discover what was the matter with him. The ...
— Supplemental Nights, Volume 6 • Richard F. Burton
... distinguished as real literature, the history of which, although poor in persons, we learn from our youth up out of the mouths of educated people, and not first of all from compilations. As a specific against the present prevailing monomania for reading literary histories, so that one may be able to chatter about everything without really knowing anything, let me refer you to a passage from Lichtenberg which is well worth reading (vol. ii. p. 302 of ...
— Essays of Schopenhauer • Arthur Schopenhauer
... mineral elements or organic salts. Just as surely as mental therapeutics and a natural diet cannot correct bony lesions produced by external violence, just so surely is it impossible to cure dementia praecox, monomania or obsession, or to supply iron, lime, sodium, etc., to the system by ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... dissecting-room; curious cases that had puzzled him; drawing-rooms, beautiful women; he sang airs from the operas, sad, broken little snatches, in a deep, mellow voice, finely trained,—fragments of a litany to the Virgin. Birkenshead's love of beauty was a hungry monomania; his brain was filled with memories of the pictures of the Ideal Mother and her Son. One by one they came to him now, the holy woman-type which for ages supplied to the world that tenderness and pity which the Church had ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 15, No. 91, May, 1865 • Various
... was foreign. There did not exist a Russian vessel larger than a fishing-boat. Yet, from some cause which cannot now be traced, he had a taste for maritime pursuits which amounted to a passion, indeed almost to a monomania. His imagination was full of sails, yardarms, and rudders. That large mind, equal to the highest duties of the general and the statesman, contracted itself to the most minute details of naval architecture and naval discipline. The ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 5 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... necessary continually to remind ourselves, when we are tempted to be incensed at his deportment, of the mode in which he had been treated, of his consuming sense of a mission, and his determination, little short of monomania, to return to its service. He and everybody knew that his conviction was an act of legal violence. There was no prospect of rescue through the machinery of the law from an overwhelming disaster which demonstrated law to be ...
— Sir Walter Ralegh - A Biography • William Stebbing
... her voice sounded particularly low and mellow. "I have a little monomania, father. Some people have a monomania for one thing and some for another. Mine is for NOT taking a bargain from the ducal ...
— The Shuttle • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... make the acquaintance of Mrs. Landys-Haggert, and for a little time—only a very little time—to make believe that he was with Alice Chisane again. Every one is more or less mad on one point. Hannasyde's particular monomania was his ...
— Indian Tales • Rudyard Kipling
... degeneration of the heart and liver, ending in the possible rupture of some valve, had persuaded me that man should live upon a pint of claret per diem. How dangerous is the clever brain with a monomania in it! According to him, a glass of sherry before dinner was a poison, whereas half the world, especially the Eastern half, prefers its potations preprandially; a quarter of the liquor suffices, and both appetite and digestion are held to be improved by it. The result of "turning over ...
— The Land of Midian, Vol. 1 • Richard Burton
... and who had three warm personal friends among the jurymen. I foresaw it, and I told him where he would get into trouble. But there are people who will not listen. M. Gransiere wants to be elected himself. It is a fancy, a monomania of our day: everybody wants to be a deputy. I wish Heaven ...
— Within an Inch of His Life • Emile Gaboriau
... to his assistance. The voice had come to him at the time of the accident. As a rule, however, the voices seemed vagarious, and he attached no importance to them, except as phenomena which interested him slightly. There was nothing flighty about him, no indication of monomania—he reasoned well, but from the point of view of a man who has had only an elementary education, knowing nothing of philosophy; he had no religious crotchets, and apparently thought little or not at all on religious matters—was, in fine, ...
— The Autobiography of a Journalist, Volume I • Stillman, William James
... opened their medical schools to women; so did the United States: only the pig-headed Briton stood stock-still, and gloried in his minority of one; as if one small island is likely to be right in its monomania, and all ...
— The Woman-Hater • Charles Reade
... personified, and made practically assailable in Moby Dick. He piled upon the whale's white hump the sum of all the general rage and hate felt by his whole race from Adam down; and then, as if his chest had been a mortar, he burst his hot heart's shell upon it. .. It is not probable that this monomania in him took its instant rise at the precise time of his bodily dismemberment. Then, in darting at the monster, knife in hand, he had but given loose to a sudden, passionate, corporal animosity; ...
— Moby-Dick • Melville
... soul. It is impossible but that such fixed attention to any one organ should prove injurious, even if the organ is not there. You really have a great deal to answer for, in encouraging this kind of monomania.' ...
— 'That Very Mab' • May Kendall and Andrew Lang
... simplest work, and has to go off and sharpen his wits at another trade. I am in that condition. For twenty months I sought the track of a man, who disappeared as if the air absorbed him where he last breathed. I did not find him. The search gave me a touch of monomania. For two months I have not been able to rest upon meeting a new face until satisfied its owner was ...
— The Art of Disappearing • John Talbot Smith
... plot had not succeeded, was more irritable than ever. The desire to rid himself of Moumouth became a fixed idea with him, a passion, a monomania; he dreamed of it day and night. Each letter in which Madame de la Grenouillere demanded news of the cat and repeated her promise of recompense to Mother Michel, each sign of interest given by the Countess to her two favorites, increased the ...
— The Story of a Cat • mile Gigault de La Bdollire
... Snug. And Master Shallow has the Weltschmerz in that latent form which is the more appealing; and discouraging questions arise as to the end of old Double; and Argan in his nightcap is the tragic figure of Monomania; and human nature shudders at the petrifaction of the intellect of Mr. F.'s ...
— The Rhythm of Life • Alice Meynell
... some grounds for the belief, that the evidence of Charles Nolin, who swore that the prisoner was willing to leave the country if he obtained from the Government a gratuity of $35,000, was inconsistent with the real existence of such a monomania as the prisoner was afflicted with. But not one isolated portion, but the whole, of Nolin's evidence should be considered. Other portions of his testimony, for instance, prisoner's opinions on religious matters, and his intention to divide up the country between various foreign nationalities, ...
— The Story of Louis Riel: The Rebel Chief • Joseph Edmund Collins
... done, the sooner we know it the better," she argued. "Daddy says little, but it is becoming a monomania with him—the dread. I wish to put an end to his suspense. Besides, if—if this Mr. Blake is as remarkable as you and the reports say he is, it will be interesting to meet him. My only fear is that so great an engineer will not ...
— Out of the Depths - A Romance of Reclamation • Robert Ames Bennet
... written and with what intention. Do you, on the other hand, endeavour to comprehend how there may be an eccentricity and obliquity in certain relations and on certain subjects, while the general character stands up worthily of esteem and regard—even of yours. Mr. Kenyon says broadly that it is monomania—neither more nor less. Then the principle of passive filial obedience is held—drawn (and quartered) from Scripture. He sees the law and the gospel on his side. Only the other day, there was a setting forth of the whole doctrine, I hear, down-stairs—'passive ...
— The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, Vol. 1 (of 2) 1845-1846 • Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett
... escapade are sometimes authorized and made right by parental tyranny or domestic serfdom. There have been exceptional cases where parents have had a monomania in regard to their sons and daughters, demanding their celibacy or forbidding relations every way right. Through absurd family ambition parents have sometimes demanded qualifications and equipment of fortune unreasonable to expect or simply impossible. Children are not expected to ...
— The Wedding Ring - A Series of Discourses for Husbands and Wives and Those - Contemplating Matrimony • T. De Witt Talmage
... even to defend myself in public from his private attacks. If in any of his publications he renews his claim, which I consider as long since settled by default, then it will be time and proper for me to notice him.... The most charitable construction of the Dr's. conduct is to attribute it to a monomania induced by excessive vanity." ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume II • Samuel F. B. Morse
... said she, "how much he detests anything like coquetry. Nellie Douglass thinks it's a kind of monomania with him, and I am inclined ...
— 'Lena Rivers • Mary J. Holmes
... cease to play, from out the cold, damp earth, she cannot be anxious. She may only be glad or sorry, and continue her way. She is perfectly herself, whatever befall! even if frosts cut her off. Happy lily, never to be saddled with an idee fixe, never to be in the grip of a monomania for happiness or love or fulfilment. It is not laisser aller. It is life-rootedness. It is being by oneself, life-living, like the much-mooted lily. One toils, one spins, one strives: just as the lily does. But like her, taking one's own life-way amidst everything, and taking one's own life-way ...
— Aaron's Rod • D. H. Lawrence
... vehemence of Captain Len Guy warned me of the necessity of treating his monomania with respect, and accepting all he ...
— An Antarctic Mystery • Jules Verne
... etc., there is a rigorous separation of the white and black races. . . . . The people of England, who see a negro only as a wandering curiosity, are not at all aware of the repugnance generally entertained toward persons of color in the United States: it appeared to amount to an absolute monomania. As for an alliance with one of the race, no matter how faint the shade of color, it would inevitably lead to a loss of caste, as fatal to social position and family ties as any that occurs in the Brahminical system. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ...
— Cotton is King and The Pro-Slavery Arguments • Various
... All probability is violated in order to bring Mr. Delvile, Mr. Briggs, Mr. Hobson, and Mr. Albany into a room together. But when we have them there, we soon forget probability in the exquisitely ludicrous effect which is produced by the conflict of four old fools, each raging with a monomania of his own, each talking a dialect of his own, and each inflaming all the others anew every time he ...
— Famous Reviews • Editor: R. Brimley Johnson
... have done it any way," said Allen, sighing. "I never can enter into the taste the others have for that style of thing; but Bobus might have succeeded. You must have expected it of him, at the time when he and I used to laugh at what we thought was a monomania on your part for our taking up medical science as a tribute to our father, when we did not need it as ...
— Magnum Bonum • Charlotte M. Yonge
... had formed a complete ticket, in which my name was not; and he was toiling with all the industry of a thoroughgoing partisan in promoting its success. The cup which he had commended to my lips was overrunning with the gall of bitterness. Hostility to me seemed really to have been a sort of monomania with him from the first. How else was this canton procedure to be accounted for? how, even with this belief, could it be excused? His conduct was certainly one of those mysteries of idiosyncracy upon which the moral philosopher may speculate ...
— Confession • W. Gilmore Simms
... woman. You wished to buy my business, and add it to the roll of your companies. And I deprived you of that triumph. Your hatred of me grew and grew. Leading a solitary and narrow life, you allowed it to develop into a species of monomania. I had come out on top once too often for your peace of mind. In your opinion the world was too small to hold both of us. Accordingly, you evolved your terrific campaign. My business was to be seriously damaged. And I was to be murdered. And then you were to ...
— Hugo - A Fantasia on Modern Themes • Arnold Bennett
... tolerate a living thing about the place that will not or cannot take orders from him. He kills the flies, the bees, the birds, the frogs, because they are not his. I believe he would kill a man as quickly who stood out even for a second against him here. To that extent I believe he is crazy: a sort of monomania. But not otherwise. That is why I say he will kill you; I really ...
— The Killer • Stewart Edward White
... such cases is in suicidal monomania, delusional insanity, etc. In that variety of the cerebral form in which a decided predisposition must be admitted to exist, to disorder of the intellectual faculties, there are found various forms of mental alienation. The chronic form ...
— Manhood Perfectly Restored • Unknown
... one of his peccadilloes. Pope's equivocation is to the equivocation of ordinary men what a tropical fern is to the stunted representatives of the same species in England. It grows until the fowls of the air can rest on its branches. His mendacity in short amounts to a monomania. That a man with intensely irritable nerves, and so fragile in constitution that his life might, without exaggeration, be called a 'long disease,' should defend himself by the natural weapons of the weak, equivocation and subterfuge, when exposed to the brutal horseplay common in that day, ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... Iscah Nicholas, though his strength was beyond question, was heavy and slow. Yet he was struggling with surprising agility. He was animated by a convulsive energy, a volcanic outburst characteristic of the obsession of monomania. ...
— Wild Oranges • Joseph Hergesheimer
... laughingly rejoined M. des Rameures, "but I must beg Monsieur de Camors to believe that I do not in any case intend to offend him. I shall also beg him to tolerate the monomania of an old man, and some freedom of language with regard to the only subject which makes ...
— Monsieur de Camors, Complete • Octave Feuillet
... then full of romance and fancy, was, it is said, possessed by such unresting, wondering thoughts of the fair maiden sovereign, and her magnificent destiny, that for a time his more prosaic friends regarded his enthusiasm as a sort of monomania. Other imaginative young men with heads less "level" (to use an American expression) than that of the great novelist, actually went mad—"clean daft"—the noble passion of loving loyalty ending in an infatuation as absurd as it was unhappy. Before the Queen left Kensington ...
— Queen Victoria, her girlhood and womanhood • Grace Greenwood
... went to church. Her cherished sorrow grew morbid; her hopeless hope became a monomania; her life narrowed down to one mournful routine. She went nowhere but to the turnstile on the turnpike, where she leaned upon the rotary cross, and ...
— Ishmael - In the Depths • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... few of the exploits of this departed worthy, actually vouched for by contemporaries. His passion for stealing was undoubtedly a monomania, for he was known in many cases to make voluntary restitution of articles that he had purloined, and his circumstances did not allow him the plea of necessity which palliates the errors of desperately poor rogues in every eye except that of ...
— The Three Brides, Love in a Cottage, and Other Tales • Francis A. Durivage
... maintained, if the counsels of the best men had been followed; but George III would listen to no policy short of coercion. He meant well, but his brain was not well balanced, he was subject to attacks of mental derangement, and his one idea of BEING KING at all hazards had become a kind of monomania (S548). Pitt condemned such oppression as morally wrong, Burke denounced it as inexpedient, and Fox, another prominent member of Parliament, wrote, "It is intolerable to think that it should be in the power of one blockhead to do ...
— The Leading Facts of English History • D.H. Montgomery
... nephew, son of Valentinian the bear-ward, had just won a great victory over the Allemanni at Colmar in Alsace; and Valens was jealous of his glory. He is said to have been a virtuous youth, whose monomania was shooting. He fell in love with the wild Alans, in spite of their horse-trappings of scalps, simply because of their skill in archery; formed a body-guard of them, and passed his time hunting with ...
— The Roman and the Teuton - A Series of Lectures delivered before the University of Cambridge • Charles Kingsley
... in every action of others toward himself the dark atmosphere of the Shadow that was peculiarly his own, he watched also their mutual actions, and, throwing from his own obscurity a shade over all human deeds, he became possessed of the monomania, a practical belief that every mortal man, except it might be Jimmy Doane, was followed and overlooked ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... was, little by little, passing away. His faculties evidently grew more feeble, as he concentrated them on a single thought. By a sad association of ideas, he referred everything to his monomania, and a human existence seemed to have departed from him, to give place to the extra-natural existence of the intermediate powers. Moreover, certain malicious rivals revived the sinister rumours which had spread concerning ...
— A Winter Amid the Ice - and Other Thrilling Stories • Jules Verne
... which he did not succeed in his endeavour. His hatred and scorn of the mass of humanity, his conception of them as a stupid, ignorant, and vulgar herd, appears throughout his work, and in his unfinished Bouvard et Pecuchet reaches almost to the proportion of a monomania. The book is an infinitely elaborate and an infinitely bitter attack on the ordinary man. There is something tragic in the spectacle of this lonely, noble, and potent genius wearing out his life at last over such a task—in a ...
— Landmarks in French Literature • G. Lytton Strachey
... people like the author who don't believe in Bibles. At any rate Sebastian, son by the first marriage, is desperately in love with Ruby—so, you see, the old man had something to worry about. However, it all turns out to be, in fact, mere illusion, developing into a fatal monomania, and the family business is left to be carried on by such of the next generation as have not been convinced by the formidable array of evidence, anti-Theistic and anti- Christian, of two of the characters (who, it is clear, have sedulously ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 152, April 18, 1917 • Various
... no business, and speared by some indignant father of a family; the figure was given me by one of their contemporaries who had been more prudent and survived. The strange persistence of these fourteen martyrs might seem to point to monomania or a series of romantic passions; gin is the more likely key. The poor buzzards sat alone in their houses by an open case; they drank; their brain was fired; they stumbled towards the nearest houses on chance; and the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 18 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... velvet, it fascinated Birotteau. From the day when the canon's friend first laid eyes on the red damask curtains, the mahogany furniture, the Aubusson carpet which adorned the vast room, then lately painted, his envy of Chapeloud's apartment became a monomania hidden within his breast. To live there, to sleep in that bed with the silk curtains where the canon slept, to have all Chapeloud's comforts about him, would be, Birotteau felt, complete happiness; he saw nothing beyond it. All the envy, ...
— The Vicar of Tours • Honore de Balzac
... and I got this woman to come in every day to scrub, help make the bed, etc. It is much less trouble, and the only fault I have to find with her is an absolute incapability of discerning blacks. I believe she thinks I have a monomania against them.' ...
— Nuttie's Father • Charlotte M. Yonge
... kinds of monomania and insanity. We learn from them to recognize all sorts of queer tendencies in minds supposed to be sane, so that we have nothing but compassion for a large class of persons condemned as sinners by theologians, but considered by us as invalids. ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... impression which you yourself must have made on others. Burns's "giftie," "to see oursel's," etc., we all, more or less, need. I told Hattie the other day that I thought some parts of your letter did you very great credit, but that the monomania of the North has fallen upon you, and that you have it, as it seemed to me, in one of its worst forms. Some it makes fierce, others, flat, according as the victim is, naturally, more or ...
— The Sable Cloud - A Southern Tale With Northern Comments (1861) • Nehemiah Adams
... shoulders and went to obey the order. The obstinacy of this self-willed egotist was surely growing into a monomania, and perhaps it would have been more dangerous to oppose him than to comply with his whim. In a few moments Dr. Cummins re-entered the ...
— For Woman's Love • Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth
... of lunacy was inept. The poor patients were whipped or otherwise tormented for alluding to the subject of their monomania. Our ancestors found fun in watching the antics of crazed minds, and made up parties to go to Bedlams and tease the insane. Indeed, some of the scenes in Shakespeare's plays, in which madness is depicted, and which seem tragic to us, probably had a comic value for the groundlings before ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... informed by Dr. Moore of the birth of his son, he received the intelligence with less impatience than she had anticipated. But this gleam of sunshine did not last long. With returning strength his old monomania returned; and he began loudly to complain of the expense which his long illness had incurred, and to rave at the extortion of doctors and nurses; declaring the necessity of making every possible retrenchment, in ...
— Mark Hurdlestone - Or, The Two Brothers • Susanna Moodie
... and in the intensity of our intellectual and moral activities. Men can intoxicate themselves with ideas as effectually as with alcohol or with bang, and produce, by dint of intense thinking, mental conditions hardly distinguishable from monomania. Demoniac possession is mythical; but the faculty of being possessed, more or less completely, by an idea is probably the fundamental condition of what is called genius, whether it show itself in the saint, the artist, or the man of science. One calls it faith, another calls ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... emphasis, and parted from them. He had not gone a hundred yards before he heard soft footsteps tracking him. He turned and was disappointed to see that it was only Karospina, who came up to him, breathing heavily, and in his catlike eyes the fixed expression of monomania. He stuttered, ...
— Visionaries • James Huneker
... enraged. His anger crushed the timid woman who shared his strange lot. His dominating temperament and moody pride were too much for her gentle soul. She became desperately afraid of him and his stern ways, of that monomania which kept them wandering through the country searching for links in a [pedigree] which had to be traced back for hundreds of years before Robert Turold could grasp ...
— The Moon Rock • Arthur J. Rees
... what he was doing and whether it was wrong. But we have learnt that a man may be perfectly well aware that he is committing a murder, and know murders to be forbidden in the Ten Commandments, and yet unable to refrain from murder. He has, say the doctors, homicidal monomania, and it is monstrous to call in the hangman when you ought to be sending for the doctor. The lawyer naturally objects to the introduction of this uncertain element, which may be easily turned to account by 'experts' capable of finding symptoms of all kinds ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... Mayoress to ask him to meet all here present at dinner to-morrow evening, after his discharge, on the plea that Professors Hanky and Panky and Dr. Downie may give him counsel, convince him of his folly, and if possible free him henceforth from the monomania ...
— Erewhon Revisited • Samuel Butler
... sunrise, viz., at 3.44 according to the almanac, and it is already after 10 p.m. Even if I sit at my task till four I shall have less than six hours in which to do justice to the great ambition and the crowning folly of my life. I used the underlined word advisedly; some would substitute 'monomania,' but I protest I am as sane as they are, fail as I may to demonstrate that fact among so many others to be dealt with in the very limited time at my disposal. Had I more time, or the pen of a readier writer, I should feel surer of vindicating my head if not my heart. ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung
... undertaken at the instigation of some stupendous impetus, that blinds the victim to the nature of her mission. It must be a sort of obsession; an intense personal instinct, amounting to madness. Nature, being determined to be well served in this direction, has supplied the necessary monomania, and the domestic idea, as you call it, grows up round this ...
— The Daughters of Danaus • Mona Caird
... or Monomania, also called Melancholia, is a form of the disease in which the patient becomes possessed of some single notion, contradictory alike to common-sense and ...
— Aids to Forensic Medicine and Toxicology • W. G. Aitchison Robertson
... his monomania for benevolence that it could not at all confine itself to the streets of Boston, the circle of his relatives, or even the United States of America. Mr. H. was fully posted up in the affairs of India, Burmah, China, and all those odd, out-of-the-way places, which no sensible man ever ...
— The May Flower, and Miscellaneous Writings • Harriet Beecher Stowe
... Union was proclaimed, the Catholic question became a ministerial difficulty. Pitt's administration failed on this very point, although it had seemed invincible a few weeks before. The obstinacy of the King, which, indeed, almost amounted to a monomania, was the principal cause. He made it a personal matter, declared it the "most jacobinical thing he had ever heard of;" and he informed the world at large that he would consider any man who proposed it his personal enemy. Pitt resigned. ...
— An Illustrated History of Ireland from AD 400 to 1800 • Mary Frances Cusack
... observation, I should think it the most unproductive source of satisfaction to the possessor. I have heard of many very wealthy men that have tormented themselves with the fear of coming to actual want, but I never heard of one man in moderate circumstances that was afflicted with this monomania." ...
— Rich Enough - a tale of the times • Hannah Farnham Sawyer Lee
... inspecting 60 Overstrand Mansions may see that somewhat excitable thing—free of charge. In another person, whom with maddening jealousy I suspect of being some inches taller than I am, I believe I notice the same tendency towards monomania. He also, being as I have so keenly pointed out, male, he also—I think has only wanted one thing seriously in his life. He also has got it: another male weakness which I recognize ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... a physician having a large practice amongst younger journalists and Members of the Legislature. This authority, after due critical inspection, pronounced it psychologically correct as a study of monomania a potu.] ...
— Punchinello, Vol.1, No. 12 , June 18,1870 • Various
... priest took several papers, and liked to talk over with his artist friend what he had read. It was the priest, pale and perturbed, who told him that war was upon the world. Peter didn't believe it. In his heart he thought that the fear of war with her great neighbor had become a monomania with the French. ...
— The Purple Heights • Marie Conway Oemler
... Press has a great deal to do with these epidemics. Let a newspaper once give an account of some out-of-the-way atrocity that has the charm of being novel, and certain depraved minds fasten to it like leeches. They brood over and revolve it—the idea grows up, a horrid phantasmalian monomania; and all of a sudden, in a hundred different places, the one seed sown by the leaden types springs up ...
— Night and Morning, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... the coat gives him a military appearance, while it economises his linen. Upon his head is a tall beaver hat, which has seen better days, but which the Universe-King is careful to keep well brushed. Pancho is slightly crazed, and his monomania consists in the belief that he is not a beggar, but a benefactor to his country. With this notion, no persuasion will induce him to accept a donation in the shape of coin. Those who are acquainted with Pancho's weakness, and desire to relieve ...
— The Pearl of the Antilles, or An Artist in Cuba • Walter Goodman
... to crease his shining shirt-front, "I must give you another piece of advice. It is serious. I have heard again and again that when a man thinks only of one thing—when he keeps brooding over it day and night—he is bound to become mad. They call it monomania. You ...
— Macleod of Dare • William Black
... all institutions, and applies with special cogency to the maintenance of health. When the mind dwells on one subject to the exclusion of all others, we call such a condition monomania. If we have an excessive development of mind, and deficient support of body, the result is corporeal derangement. It is unfortunate for any child to inherit unusually large brain endowments, unless he is possessed of a vigorous, robust constitution. Such training should be ...
— The People's Common Sense Medical Adviser in Plain English • R. V. Pierce
... gently as might be, to wean him from this fanatic worship of the Muses. It was his monomania; on all ordinary subjects he was sensible enough, and fain was she to engage him in ordinary topics. He questioned her sometimes about his place at Nunnely; she was but too happy to answer his interrogatories at length. She never wearied of ...
— Shirley • Charlotte Bronte
... wink Scares patients he has put, for reason good, Under restriction,—maybe, talked sometimes Of douche or horsewhip to,—for why? because The gentleman would crazily declare His best friend was—Iago! Ay, and worse— The lady, all at once grown lunatic, In suicidal monomania vowed, To save her soul, she needs must starve herself! They're cured now, both, and I tell nobody. Why don't you speak? Nay, speechless, each of you Can spare,—without unclasping plighted troth,— At least one hand to shake! Left-hands will do— Yours ...
— Browning's England - A Study in English Influences in Browning • Helen Archibald Clarke
... recognise that there are primitive instincts of tremendous power, which, held in check by our dull and laborious, yet sexually-exciting, civilisation, break out at times in many individuals like a veritable monomania. In earlier civilisations this fact was frankly recognised, and such instincts were prevented from working mischief by the provision of means wherein they might expend themselves. Hence the widespread custom of festivals with the accompanying ...
— The Truth About Woman • C. Gasquoine Hartley
... cleanly as a gentleman should, though he did not leave off sack. He was not a brawling, boisterous ruffian, reveling in the slums. He was essentially a family man and a student who "scorned delights and lived laborious days." His regard for the purity of women amounted almost to a monomania, and he lived up to his own preachment on all the various forms of integrity with much more strictness than people who affected to believe he was leper. Furthermore the man was an ascetic in his essential spirit. He had the true taste for the finely ...
— Volume 12 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... or a student of psychology might have found an analysis of her feelings interesting. She had reached the border-line of monomania, yet he would have been a daring man who would have called her absolutely insane. Except to Foyle she had said nothing of ...
— The Grell Mystery • Frank Froest
... all too soon, it became manifest that the memory of his passionate attachment for her mother possessed Victor to the point of monomania. It was only with an effort that he could force himself to talk to Sofia on other subjects. He thought of nothing else while with her; if she read his eyes aright, often glimpses of weird light flickering in their ...
— Red Masquerade • Louis Joseph Vance
... inconsistency is still more perceptible when speaking of the lives and characters of his socialists. Sometimes the reader receives the impression that an egregious vanity, an eccentric ambition, and perhaps a little touch of monomania, would complete the picture, and sufficiently explain that conduct, of a hero of socialism. At another time his enthusiasts assume a more imposing aspect. St Simon sacrificing his fortune, abjuring the patronage of the court, dying in extreme poverty—Charles Fourier refusing all entrance ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Volume 56, Number 349, November, 1844 • Various
... Germany, Italy, France, and our own mildly ruled England. A brooding, morose, concentrated hatred of those who possess any kind of substance or comfort; landlord, farmer, every one. An unsparing vendetta, a merciless shark-like thirst of destructive vengeance; a monomania of battering, smashing, crushing, such as seizes the Lancashire weaver, who kicks his woman's brains out without any special reason for dislike, mingled with and made more terrible by this unchangeable hostility to property and those who own it. No creed, no high moral hopes ...
— The Life of the Fields • Richard Jefferies
... labored in heartsick pity to remove her fixed idea, which soon became a monomania, that she alone was to blame for the Judge's death. It now seemed to him, in his sympathy with her grief, that she had been like a child entrusted with some frail, priceless object and not warned of its fragility. She herself cried out constantly ...
— The Squirrel-Cage • Dorothy Canfield
... dramatic adventures follow in his history, the last of which landed him, wholly unjustifiably, in prison for ten years. When asked why all his love adventures ended so disastrously, he replied: "Doctor, all my life I have been suffering from a 'superaltruistic monomania to help girls in distress,' and that is ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck
... me on the subject of what he called my hallucination with regard to my having married in America. He never allowed any allusion to the circumstance without the most comical expressions of regret for this, as he called it, curious form of monomania. On the occasion to which I refer in this letter, he and Mrs. Smith had met some friends at dinner at our house, and I was taking leave of them, previous to my departure for Liverpool, when he exclaimed, "Now ...
— Records of Later Life • Frances Anne Kemble
... unknown enemies, and abused by anonymous writers, but attempts of other kinds are said to have been made to render his life as uncomfortable as possible. There are grounds, however, for doubting whether Shelley was not subject to a kind of monomania upon this and similar points. In 1821, he wrote his Adonais, a monody on the death of Keats. Part of this poem had its origin in the mistaken notion, that the illness and death of Keats were caused by a brutal criticism of ...
— A Dish Of Orts • George MacDonald
... the Eastern travellers' dread—the demon of Thirst rode like Care behind us. For twenty-four hours we did not taste water, the sun parched our brains, the mirage mocked us at every turn, and the effect was a species of monomania. As I jogged along with eyes closed against the fiery air, no image unconnected with the want suggested itself. Water ever lay before me—water lying deep in the shady well—water in streams bubbling icy from the rock—water in ...
— First footsteps in East Africa • Richard F. Burton
... surprised" (Mr. Lanfray wrote) "if you get a strange note from a very eccentric Italian, one Professor Tizzi, formerly of the University of Padua. I have known him for some years. Scientific inquiry is his monomania, and vanity his ruling passion. He has written a book on the principle of life, which nobody but himself will ever read; but which he is determined to publish, with his own portrait for frontispiece. If it is worth your while to accept the little he can offer ...
— After Dark • Wilkie Collins
... 'how we were all wild to comb your hair? It led to furious quarrels every day. Fancy, Andrea—at last it came to bloodshed! Oh, I shall never forget the scene between Carlotta Fiordelise and Gabriella Vanni. It got to be sheer monomania. To comb Maria Bandinelli's hair was the one ambition in life of every school-girl there—big or little. The epidemic spread through the whole school, and resulted in scoldings, punishments, and finally threats to have your hair cut off. Do you remember, Maria? Our ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... would warn his friend of the danger that threatened him, even if his words should be spoken into the wind. For Reginald, with an ingenuity almost satanic, had already suggested that the delusion of former days had developed into a monomania, and any attempt on his part to warn Jack would only seem to confirm this theory. In that case only one way was left open. He must plead with Reginald himself, confront at all risks that snatcher of souls. To-night he would not fall asleep. He would keep his vigil. And if Reginald should approach ...
— The House of the Vampire • George Sylvester Viereck
... nature had been unreliable became treacherous; his stolidity became sullenness. A slow ferocity burned within him; embers of a rage which no brooding ever quenched slumbered red in his brain until his endless meditation became a monomania. And his monomania was the ruin of this woman who had taken from him in the very moment of consummation all that he had ever really loved in the world—a thin, awkward, freckled, red-haired country girl, in whom, for the first ...
— The Dark Star • Robert W. Chambers
... befell him. The monomania of his wife became chronic. A letter which she wrote and sent by special messenger called forth from Thomas this loving sympathy:—"You must endeavour to consider it a disease. The eyes and ears of many are upon you, to whom your conduct is unimpeachable with respect to all ...
— The Life of William Carey • George Smith
... classes with whom she came unavoidably in contact. A slight breach of the conventions earned her distrust of one of her own caste. As this personal idiosyncrasy fell in line with the de Laney pride, it was approved by the head of the family. Under encouragement it became almost a monomania. ...
— The Claim Jumpers • Stewart Edward White
... because it represents luxury, the American business man loves it chiefly because it is the sole proof of success in his endeavor. He loves his business. It is not his toil, but his hobby, passion, vice, monomania—any vituperative epithet you like to bestow on it! He does not look forward to living in the evening; he lives most intensely when he is in the midst of his organization. His instincts are best appeased by the hourly excitements ...
— Your United States - Impressions of a first visit • Arnold Bennett
... of dream in which children often live is not without analogy to somnambulism. The fixed idea is another instance of the same phenomenon, which is produced in the waking state, and which, when exaggerated, becomes monomania, a kind of morbid monoideism; children, having very few ideas, would very soon acquire fixed ideas, if it were not for the mobility of attention which the ceaseless variation of the surrounding world produces in them. Thus all the facts grouped ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... dear Doctor, you must excuse me if I appear to dwell on this rather, because I feel so very strongly. I call it quite my monomania, it is such a subject of mine. You are a blessing to us. You really are ...
— David Copperfield • Charles Dickens
... defence—as, for example, that of Dr Pitois, of Rennes, who was Helene's own doctor, and who said that "the woman had a bizarre character, frequently complaining of stomach pains and formications in the head''—in spite of this doctor's hints of monomania in the accused, the jury, with every chance allowed them to find her irresponsible, still saw nothing in her extenuation. And very properly, since the law held the extreme penalty for such as she, Helene went to the scaffold. Her judges might have taken the sentimental view that she was abnormal, ...
— She Stands Accused • Victor MacClure
... opposite side of the harbour. He can tell us all the particulars of the two sieges, and show us the site of most of the public buildings; he is filled with anecdotes of all the principal actors in the sad tragedies that have been enacted here; but he labours under a most singular monomania. Having told these stories so often he now believes that he was present at the first capture of the fortress, under Colonel Pepperal and the New England militia in 1745, and at the second in 1754, when it was taken by Generals Amherst and Wolfe. I suppose he may be ninety ...
— Nature and Human Nature • Thomas Chandler Haliburton
... Court Circulars and catalogues of aristocratic names till the fascination becomes irresistible, and the desire to see her own name, purged of cotton or guano, figuring in the same sheet grows to a monomania. But how is this to be done? Fortunately for the purpose which she has in view, there exist in these latter days amphibious beings, half trader, half fop, with one set of relations with the world of commerce and another set of relations with the world of fashion. The dandy, driven into the ...
— Modern Women and What is Said of Them - A Reprint of A Series of Articles in the Saturday Review (1868) • Anonymous
... said Lady Agatha. "The hunt had become a monomania with him. It had become an obsession. He had given his whole mentality to it and it had absorbed all his faculties. He was now the victim of it. He had grown powerless in the grip of the idea; he had ...
— The Cruise of the Jasper B. • Don Marquis
... British Museum; when (1753) Horace Walpole remarks that they might be worth L80,000 for anybody who loved hippopotamuses, sharks with one ear, and spiders as big as geese. Scientific research, that is, revealed itself to contemporaries as a childish and absurd monomania, unworthy of a man of sense. John Hunter had not yet begun to form the unequalled museum of physiology, and even the scientific collectors could have but a dim perception of the importance of a minute observation of natural phenomena. The contempt for such collections naturally ...
— English Literature and Society in the Eighteenth Century • Leslie Stephen
... nations, and contrived to bring together foreigners from the wilds of America, the Cape of Good Hope, and even savages from the isles of the Pacific; in fact, she was the notorious lion-hunter of her age. It was supposed that she had a peculiar ignorance of the laws of meum and tuum, and that her monomania was such that she would try to get possession of whatever she could place her hands upon; so that it was dangerous to leave in the ante-room anything of value. On application being made, however, the articles were usually ...
— Reminiscences of Captain Gronow • Rees Howell Gronow
... mother's heart, and his disappearance rather aroused some misgiving and self-reproachful sensations in that of his father. Mr. Calvert, too, had his touch of hypochondria in consequence of his increased loneliness, and Ned Hinkley's fighting monomania underwent startling increase; but, with the rest, the wheel went on without much sensible difference. The truth is, that, however mortifying the truth may be, the best of us makes but a very small sensation in his absence. Death is a longer absence, in ...
— Charlemont • W. Gilmore Simms
... far more dangerous than frenzy. Their skill was powerless; they could not give the Marquis even the slightest ray of hope. It was not long before the Marquise became frightfully pale and emaciated, while her mind was more than ever under the control of the monomania which saw her daughter in all the objects that surrounded her. She took, by turns, flowers, articles of clothing and of furniture, lavishing every mark of affection upon them and calling them by the most endearing names until their ...
— Which? - or, Between Two Women • Ernest Daudet
... object? Surely not the need of money, nor yet the desire for jewels, since you have means enough to purchase all you might wish, and you tried to sell those you stole. One would almost suppose that it was a sort of monomania with you." ...
— True Love's Reward • Mrs. Georgie Sheldon
... her, like a monomaniac, about his Moving Fortress. It didn't bore her to listen, because she didn't have to answer; she had only to look at him and smile, and nod her head at him now and then as a sign of enthusiasm. She liked looking at him; she liked his young naivete and monomania; she liked his face and all his gestures, and the poise and ...
— The Tree of Heaven • May Sinclair
... examined Bertram unanimously gave it as their opinion that he was sane, and could only account for his extraordinary nocturnal actions by the supposition that he must be the victim of some strange monomania. His companions, with whom he was most popular, all testified to his amiability and lovable disposition. In the end he was sentenced to a year's imprisonment, and after his release was never again heard of. There can, I think, be little doubt, from what he himself ...
— Werwolves • Elliott O'Donnell
... writer of the letter, acting together on my mind, suggested an idea, which I was literally afraid to express openly, or even to encourage secretly. I began to doubt whether my own faculties were not in danger of losing their balance. It seemed almost like a monomania to be tracing back everything strange that happened, everything unexpected that was said, always to the same hidden source and the same sinister influence. I resolved, this time, in defence of my own courage and my own sense, to come to no decision that plain fact did not warrant, and ...
— The Woman in White • Wilkie Collins
... so taxed me with it. Wopsle, too, took pains to present me in the worst light. At once ferocious and maudlin, I was made to murder my uncle with no extenuating circumstances whatever; Millwood put me down in argument, on every occasion; it became sheer monomania in my master's daughter to care a button for me; and all I can say for my gasping and procrastinating conduct on the fatal morning, is, that it was worthy of the general feebleness of my character. Even after I was happily hanged and ...
— Great Expectations • Charles Dickens
... Begams was at first confided, he conceived the notion that Shah Alam, as the head of the family, was probably, nay, certainly, the possessor of an exclusive knowledge regarding the place of a vast secret hoard. All the crimes and horrors that ensued are attributable to the action of this monomania. On the 29th, he made the new Titular, Bedar Bakht, inflict corporal chastisement upon his venerable predecessor. On the 30th, a similar outrage was committed upon several of the ladies of Shah Alam's ...
— The Fall of the Moghul Empire of Hindustan • H. G. Keene
... with the war temporarily deprives such a country and its few misguided prophets whose monomania is dread of that chimera, the "Colossus of the North," of the pastime of nestling up to Europe in the hope of annoying us. It postpones, too, the hope of the morbid ones that we shall come to war with a powerful enemy. Now, perhaps, even these will appreciate ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... insanity takes possession of the woman's mind—a species of dumb monomania which is only observable when her fixed idea ...
— Halil the Pedlar - A Tale of Old Stambul • Mr Jkai
... consideration, it is evident that this strong excitement and exclusive occupation of the mind upon one subject, operating upon a system in a high state of morbid irritability, was in danger of producing that species of mental derangement called monomania. The poor little being was aware, herself, of the dangers of her case, and alluded to it in the following passage of a letter to Colonel Wildman, which presents one of the most lamentable pictures of anticipated evil ever conjured up ...
— Abbotsford and Newstead Abbey • Washington Irving
... substitute, in his treatment for madness, commiseration and benevolence for the terrible coercive means employed formerly; no more chains, no more blows, no more shower-baths; above all (save in some few cases), no more solitary confinement. His lofty understanding had comprehended that monomania, insanity, and madness were increased by confinement and abusive treatment; that, on the contrary, by allowing the patients to live together, a thousand distractions, a thousand incidents occurring at each moment, prevented ...
— Mysteries of Paris, V3 • Eugene Sue
... is it? As for the London estate, mother, that is all moonshine. What if it were gone altogether? It may be that it is that which vexes my father; but if so, it is a monomania." ...
— Castle Richmond • Anthony Trollope
... house upside down; after one or two days spent in vain search, and hope, and despair; after a prodigious expenditure of the liveliest irritation of soul, who has not known the ineffable pleasure of finding that all-important nothing which had come to be a king of monomania? Very good. Now, spread that fury of search over five years; put a woman, put a heart, put love in the place of the trifle; transpose the monomania into the key of high passion; and, furthermore, let the seeker be a ...
— The Thirteen • Honore de Balzac
... know that the countess had left Paris?" said la Peyrade, rushing at the chance of speaking on the subject of his present monomania. ...
— The Lesser Bourgeoisie • Honore de Balzac
... as possible, while taking every care to guard her and see to her comfort. All day long she sat brooding—and only Esther Mawson, now for some time in her full confidence, knew that her brooding was rapidly developing into a monomania. Mrs. Mallathorpe, indeed, had but one thought in her mind—the eventual circumventing of Pratt, and the destruction of John ...
— The Talleyrand Maxim • J. S. Fletcher
... simply, it awaits those who can receive and not be intoxicated by it. And now the planet which I had disobeyed for another avenges itself,—seeing, naturally, in strange results, whose methods are untraceable, nothing but monomania. The photographs, in which the pollens of two planet-flowers mingle, lie in my attic, dust-eaten:—"Above all, the patient must not see anything of that kind," has been the order ever since I published a card announcing ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 10, No. 58, August, 1862 • Various
... back, and refused utterly, upon my application, to take any steps for the safety or salvation of his command. I could but conclude that the man was either insane, premeditated treachery to his troops, or perhaps that his grossly intemperate habits long continued had produced idiocy or monomania. In either case the command was imperiled, and a military necessity demanded that something be done, and that without delay. I took the only step I believed available to save your troops. I arrested this man, have drawn charges against him, and ...
— The American Indian as Participant in the Civil War • Annie Heloise Abel
... present existing in the Metropolis, as well as in the provincial districts, certain individuals known and spoken of as "Gents," whose bearing and manners are perfectly at variance with the characters, which, from a monomania, they appear desirous ...
— Gossip in the First Decade of Victoria's Reign • John Ashton
... Middleton, when he sought to learn something about him, heard the strangest stories of his habits of life, of his temper, and of his employments, from the people with whom he conversed. The old legend, turning upon the monomania of the family, was revived in full force in reference to this poor gentleman; and many a time Middleton's interlocutors shook their wise heads, saying with a knowing look and under their breath that the old gentleman was looking ...
— Sketches and Studies • Nathaniel Hawthorne
... went round the countryside in all weathers selling books, maps and sewing machines. Her devotion to those brothers was of course splendid, yet I now think that Wilma, temperamental and overworked, had let it become a kind of monomania with her. ...
— A Busy Year at the Old Squire's • Charles Asbury Stephens |
